Christ against Nazism and Christendom
Benjamin Fondane on the lust of reason and the longing of faith
I’m working feverishly now to finish this biblical Christology (due end of the month), and the section I’m currently writing compares Calvin’s sermons on Micah with the philosophy and poetry of Benjamin Fondane, the Jewish existentialist poet and philosopher who was murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau just two weeks before the Russians liberated the camp.
One of his most important works is the essay “Man Before History,” written for a 1939 symposium on the European political crisis. In it, Fondane contends that both Nazism and any kind of reversion to Christendom should be rejected because both are manifestations of a rationalism that cannot help but dehumanize and bestialize us.
Fondane was not a Christian. He is one of those figures caught in the alleyway between the synagogue and the church. Still, he believes the only hope of deliverance from the tyranny of the Idea comes in and through radical imitation of the crucified Christ. Like Calvin, Fondane insists there must be a yielding to God. Unlike Calvin, he holds that that yielding is possible only if it is equally yoked to an absolute refusal to accept the events of history as particular providences.
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“Man Before History”—the burden of the essay is to make clear, against the pressures of popular opinion, that those opposed to Hitler’s Nazism are not in fact more rational than he is. Against those who criticize “the other side” as immoral and irrational, Fondane contends that both “enlightened” moralism and the immorality it claims to hate—but in fact feeds and feeds on—are emergent from the same arrogant will-to-self-determination.
In Fondane’s judgment, what the West has long needed is “a far-sighted humanism,” one intimately acquainted with the wretchedness of the real and so appropriately modest, playful, restrained, pessimistic. Tragically, the prophetic figures who had the wisdom and courage to call for such a way of life—figures like Kierkegaard, Pascal, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Shestov, Fondane’s mentor—were either grossly misunderstood or roundly ignored. The West promoted the autonomous individual to the rank of “universal legislator,” and constructed an “inhuman Tower of Babel” it called “civilization.” In the process, the civilized lost their nature, all while hiding that loss under moral uprightness and the guise of one kind of orthodoxy or another.
It is when we decide that it is unworthy of man to have little vices and we suppress the legal right to drink alcohol that drunkenness and gangsterism grip the nation; it is when we decide that society must be able to do without that wretched institution we call prostitution that we provoke on a vast scale the quasi-official traffic in human flesh; it is when we establish a League of Nations that has to end all war forever that we witness the most unheard-of violation of pacts, of words, and of plain and simple rights in preparation for total war… This is noticeable not so much in the increase in outbreaks of violence or in the taste for blood as in the fact that these now enter into history set up as principles, whitewashed as science.1
Sharp as his criticisms were, Fondane wouldn’t allow his readers to “otherize” the Nazis. He maintains that Hitler’s National Socialism is not an aberration or an “original essence” alien to modern rationality, but “a distorting mirror that reflects back to us a magnified image of our culture’s defining features.” “‘Barbaric’ as he may be, 'Mr. Hitler is not only reasonable but is Reason itself…”
Knowing his readers will be skeptical of such claims, he offers an example, the most obvious one he can think of, drawn from a piece of Nazi propaganda:
Do you want an example? All right! Let’s take the most well-known. Everyone, including even those priest-hating detractors of Christianity, was scandalized by that little phrase that Herr Goebbels’s propaganda has made universal: “How did Planetta die? Shouting: Heil Hitler and long live Germany! How did Christ die? On the cross, sniveling.” Everyone was scandalized by that phrase, a reaction that was not even hypocritical but just thoughtless—which is worse…
Fondane then asks whether Western civilization prizes the death of Christ or the death of Socrates, Mark’s Gospel or John’s:
Tell me, is it likely that Christ is the prototype of our reason, the hero of the Idea? Is it the death of Christ or rather that of Socrates which forms the basis of our civilization? How, then, did they die: the philosophers, the Stoics, or even the Christian martyrs? Didn’t they shout: Heil . . . something or other, some sort of ideal, Justice, Law, Virtue, Holiness? Did they die “sniveling” or rather, on the contrary, “singing during their torments”? According to reason, which Christ died best? The one of Matthew and Mark who groaned “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?,” or rather Luke’s, who said “Lord, into your hands I return my spirit,” or John’s, who said “Everything is accomplished”? You see then, that “barbaric” as he may be, Mr. Hitler is not only reasonable but is Reason itself, sincere at last—the same reason that, long before the German dictator, was embarrassed that Christ died “sniveling,” and then was so happy when John thought it best to have him die nobly, making him shout like Planetta: “Heil Jehovah! Everything is accomplished!” As stupid and petty as Goebbels’s comparison of the death of Planetta and that of Christ may be, as revolting as it appears to us and in fact is, its sharpest point touches us and our own civilization—we who made it possible—more than it touches the ones who came up with it…”2
I would say Fondane should have made finer distinctions between what the Third and Fourth Gospels actually say and what Christians take them to mean, as well as between martyrdom and “self-sacrifice,” but his point holds nevertheless. There is a “Praise God!” of the same spirit as “Heil Hitler!” Sacrificing oneself for “the glory of Germany” is not so different, really, from sacrificing oneself for “the glory of God.”
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It is all too easy to convince people to sacrifice themselves, now as well as then. All that is needed, as Fondane says, is “a few speeches and a well-run press.” Why is that? Because “the need for self-sacrifice is built into the human frame.” What is not built into the human frame, however, is “true humility.”
True humility, notice. Not, as Fondane explains, the faux-humility of “self-mastery,” but the acceptance of our essential powerlessness, an acceptance that frees us from being afraid or ashamed to be afraid and ashamed, permitting us to cry out, to snivel, to call for help. “There is more true humility,” he says, “in praying to God for one’s own flesh, in asking him, for example, for deliverance from a terrible toothache (as Saint Augustine did…) than to ask him to reveal his intelligible essence or confuse his will with ours in the delights of [mystical] union.”
Hearing that, you can see why authentic faith, in Fondane’s view, is possible only when we have been stripped of all grandiosity and pollyanna. For him, those who are truly spiritual are absolutely down to earth. Those who are truly holy know they are anything but “saints.” As he saw it, the most difficult thing, the supreme act of heroism, is not self-sacrifice but “admitting spiritual defeat.” Nothing is harder for our spirit, he found, than to confess “I can do nothing, nothing, there is nothing more to be done.” Yet it is in that very confession, honestly made, that our spirit is at its purest.
Like Shestov, Fondane believed that sometime in the Middle Ages Western civilization, to its hurt, fundamentally confused God and the world. Worse, to its shame, it refused to face the truth of the very figure its spiritual exercises put continuously before it: “a suffering, wretched, powerless God, dying ignominiously on a wooden cross.”3
Even if Christians forgot the truth everywhere staring them in the face, the truth is that Jesus of Nazareth was defeated, and admitted it, without despair or false bravado. Christians who cannot accept that fact, who find themselves offended by his weakness and ashamed of his cries, are not so different from the Nazis. Ultimately, their piety simply remakes Christ in Planetta’s image.
In truth, Jesus’ defeat, precisely because of the way he accepted it, was infinitely more effective than any victory could have been. “This powerlessness,” Fondane says, undergone at the cross, “was not cowardice, a lack of bravery, or even a lack of resourcefulness but heroism, and thus powerlessness triumphant, stronger than all the powers of the world and of reason…”4 So, despite what the Nazi party says, despite what many Christian parties claim to want, the only actually human future is the one opened by accepting finitude as Jesus did, determining not to die shouting “Heil… anything,” but “sniveling” a prayer of protest and supplication.
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Fondane admits his conclusion leaves him conflicted: “Is that the conclusion that I wanted to come to? No, it is the conclusion to which my own thought has led me in spite of myself…” He categorically refuses both despair and false comfort. He dreams of useful reforms and taking measures that make a difference.5 Still, he admits, somewhat reluctantly, that he needs more than his own dignity; he needs something he himself cannot give or keep—“not only a better future but also a past that has been put right; not just sufferings justified but also wiped clean, erased; not just healed but as if they had not been.”6
Obviously, History or Reason cannot unmake what has been. And theologians, as a rule, maintain it is impossible even for God. Faith desires it, nonetheless. And faith, Fondane had come to believe, is more in touch with our actual condition than reason can ever be. Reason cannot grasp the truth in which all other truths fit—because it is held by that truth. To deny one’s faith, then, which is always essentially faith in the impossible, would be to deny one’s own being. To that, I would just add this: if Christian theology is even remotely right, reason cannot grasp its own meaning, much less the truth of faith, because God loves us for no reason whatsoever. And if God cannot do what faith desires, despite what reason expects, then Paul was wrong to say that God is able to do “exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think.”
That kind of faith does not come naturally to anyone, of course. Fondane learned this from Shestov: “at the crucial moment,” the moment of crucifixion, “when our reason testifies unhesitatingly that there is not and cannot be any hope,” “a grain of faith” miraculously awakens us from the bad dream of dogmatic rationality and leads us into “the realm of freedom where everything is possible, even canceling a tear, changing the past, restoring his children (his original children!) back to Job.”7 There, only there, in the state of final powerlessness and total yielding, a nothing-to-lose faith arises, faith in the God for whom all things truly are possible.
Benjamin Fondane, “Man Before History,” in Benjamin Fondane, Existential Monday: Philosophical Essays (New York: New York Review of Books, 2016), p. 57.
Fondane, “Man Before History,” p. 58.
Fondane, “Man Before History,” p. 56.
Fondane, “Man Before History,” p. 58.
The next year, Fondane would be called up from the reserves to fight with the French resistance forces, and not long after was taken by the Germans as a prisoner of war. When a neighbor reported him, According to a doctor at Auschwitz who managed for a few weeks to hide Fondane in the camp infirmary, the poet in his last days recited poetry for his fellow inmates. These acts tell us much about what his words mean.
Fondane, “Man Before History,” p. 61.
Ricardo L. Nirenberg, “The Passion of Benjamin Fondane,” Offcourse 80 (March 2020); available online: https://www.albany.edu/offcourse/issue80/passion_benjamin_fondane.html.